Culture shock

Hey, hasn’t it been quiet around here?! Don’t worry, we’re still alive! We’re enjoying summer holidays, Manu is walking and talking, I’m starting a new job in October, all is well.

Today I got accosted in the supermarket by a Greek grandma who tried to convert me to Christianity.

It seems that my small-town Kiwi attitude to interacting with strangers is a bit different to the Greek standard: in simple terms, I’m an easy mark. Sometimes this pays off in my favour: when we stopped off at the village of Aghios Georgios on our way to Patras I got a lecture on the age of the Roman aqueduct (2044 years, I think I remember), the universality of engineering and mathematics (when modern Greeks constructed a pipeline to carry the same water to roughly the same destinations, they followed exactly the same path, with the same gradient, as the Romans had), and the goodness of the human spirit in general and the Greek spirit in particular (I should say it mostly paid off in my favour).

And then there are days like today.

I had Manu asleep in his buggy, and (as happens frequently) a passing grandma cooed over him; somewhat unusually, she also made the sign of the cross in his general direction a couple of times. And (this is where my small-town openness comes into play) she struck up a conversation. From the obvious (was he asleep? how cute) she went straight to the heart of the matter: was he baptised? No, he wasn’t. Was I Christian? No, I wasn’t. What was I? Nothing, I guess (I’m missing the Greek vocabulary to express myself very clearly on this point, but she evidently got the idea). At this point she launched into something too complicated for me to follow, and I had to point out that I was a foreigner and my grasp of Greek wasn’t too reliable. She backed up, and started explaining very carefully the advantages available to a true believer: the saints will perform miracles for you. And if you have a family, you need these miracles, if you want your children to grow up as good people. Hadn’t I seen the news, what happens in Athens? Violence and hashish and so on. (I think, but am not sure, that this was somehow connected to my being a foreigner: it might be that Athens is where foreign immigrants behave badly in the popular Greek consciousness. Or I may have simply missed the point.) She showed me the cross she wears, and an icon pinned to her blouse: this saint (I missed the name) has her name day tomorrow. (I wonder if it was coincidence, or whether she rotates the icons she carries to match the upcoming feast days: there are a lot of them.) Her own name was Despoina, which is the name of the Panagia, the mother of Christ: she has many names: Despoina, Maria, …

At this point I tried to extricate myself gracefully: thank you for the stories, I have to go now. She had her hand on the handle of Manu’s buggy, and she didn’t let up. What was my name? (Tikitu.) Pardon? (Tikitu. I’m used to this reaction.) What was my Greek name? (Takis.) Hm. Takis. From Dimitris, of course. (There are plenty of other Greek names that end up as “Takis”, by the curious pattern of first lengthening the name by making it a diminutive, then shortening it again by throwing away everything except the diminutive ending you just added. Perhaps the most surprising is Panagiótis -> Panagiotákis -> Tákis. In fact my “Takis” comes via the same process: Tikitu -> Tikitakis -> Takis. I didn’t try to explain.) Then she stopped to think a moment, and gave me directions to the nearest church of St Dimitrios: if I went there, and asked for a miracle to help me believe, she was sure that a miracle would be forthcoming.

Despite the politeness that gets me into these situations, I do have some pretty strong and deep-rooted beliefs about this stuff. In my stumbling Greek I tried to explain that I appreciate the depth of her belief, but that I believe something different: I believe that it’s possible to raise children who are good people without following Christ, but most importantly I believe in not trying to force my beliefs on other people. This is where I feel my lack of linguistic competence most keenly: in English I can deploy phrases such as “please do me the courtesy of” and be sure of their balance between politeness and emphasis. In Greek I can never be sure if I’m clearly expressing the point, and I run the constant risk of being startlingly rude by accident.

In this case, at least, I must have erred on the not-clear-enough side: it barely slowed her down for a moment. Instead, she told me a story of how she travelled to (I think) a particular island, at some expense and difficulty, to ask (I think) a particular saint to grant her grandchildren. The next year, on the very day that she asked for a miracle, her granddaughter was born.

My feta was getting warm. I said again that I was out of time: she assured me that she also had to leave, then started telling me how when she was 18 years old, she heard that the Germans had killed her sister and she woke up the next day with her hair all white. (I think I have this right: like every part of this story you have to appreciate that it’s filtered through my extremely limited Greek understanding. There’s a reason those “prisoner’s tales” are few and far between: each one, short though they are, takes quite some hours of back-and-forth, with Olga helping in the translation, to be sure I’m reporting what was actually said to me.)

I also failed to understand what the religious relevance of this story was, but I’m pretty sure I caught the next bit: she told me that I should “stavrono” my boy. At first I wasn’t sure what this meant, but she made it clear: I should make the sign of the cross over him. “You don’t need to have anything in your fingers” (is that a thing?), but I should make the sign over him while he’s sleeping, when he wakes, when he eats… the more often the better. It doesn’t matter if I don’t believe: if I make the sign, Christ will watch over him. (And, presumably, make sure he doesn’t end up on the news in Athens.) After all, when you have a child, you believe that the good of the child is more important than your own good: I did believe that, didn’t I, she checked.

At this point I finally managed to channel my inner Greek and overcome my outer Kiwi: I said again that I had to go, and this time I went.

In the abstract I find this attitude rather fascinating. Here is someone who lives their religion not just as theology (the relationship of the soul with God), not just socially (in their local church, in their relationships with other believers) but magically: for her miracles occur frequently in the world, and someone who is not regularly petitioning the saints for their share of the miracles is missing out.

Concretely, in the supermarket with Manu asleep in his buggy and a half-kilo of feta warming up in my shopping basket, mostly I just wished I had the Greek confidence (both linguistic and social) to negotiate such interactions without getting caught up in them.